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New MP3 License Terms Demand $0.75 Per Decoder
Götz writes "The licensing terms of Thomson and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, who are the owners of the mp3 patents, have changed. Now not only mp3 encoders but also
mp3 decoders require a license. This page lists the fees -- it's $0.75 per decoder. As a consequence, Red Hat has already removed all mp3 players from the Rawhide development version."
I'm not trolling (this time). I really want to know.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
I'm hoping that this decision will result in (more?) portable Ogg-based players hitting the market! I would have purchased an iPod immediately had it supported Ogg; however, it didn't, and I was not about to convert my music back to MP3 just for it.
If anyone knows of any portable players that support Ogg Vorbis, please post below! Thank You!
here's where slashdot can really shine. I, like many of you out there, have scanned my album collection into mp3 format. Why? Because this was the most popular, ubiquitous format when I did it. I'd love to go to ogg. To do so, i need a simple way to recurse through about 36 gigs of mp3s and reencode them into ogg, and delete the originals. I know there's no reason why one shell command shouldn't suffice. I know if I were to do a decent search through freshmeat, i'd be able to find a command-line program to do it, and the proper args, etc. But i know someone here already knows it. ***PLEASE*** post instructions, and whatever software i need to get, and yours is the karma and everything in it.
Absolutely brilliant. Wait until it gets mass market acceptance, then start charging fees. Now that I've got a portable MP3 player, an MP3-compatible DVD player, and all 300+ CD's in my collection digitized in MP3 format, now bring out the fees. You win, guys, here's my $3.00 for the car, the DVD deck, and WinAmp on my laptop and desktop. Sure beats re-recording everything in Ogg, which wasn't mainstream enough when I first started ripping my CD's a couple of years back.
What? You don't agree? Well, my time's worth the $3. If they charged $10 per decoder, I'd still probably pay it - and in fact, that's the only mistake I think they're making, not charging enough. Because while I'd gladly pay $3 today, they should realize that going forward, I won't rip a single song in MP3 format. They'll make short-term revenues by screwing guys like me, but they're digging a hole in the long run.
What's your damage, Heather?
"Our goal is it to convince hardware manufacturers to include ogg vorbis support in their products. Ogg Vorbis is a high quality audio codec which is patent free!"
Sign here
Will you be signee 2102?
(Yeah, yeah, petitions don't work. Whatever)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
There is some tax on "music" CD-Rs in Canada, but not on "data" CD-Rs. When I heard this I said, "What!?" So you have the option of paying more for CDs that you will burn your music backups to, and the same for CDs that contain just "ordinary" data.
There has been a tax on recordable magnetic music media for more than a year now, with the proceeds supposedly going to battered musicians, or perhaps just to deter audio tape pirating, I'm not sure which...
Last year there was brief fuss when a Liberal cabinet minister in charge of Canadian Heritage, Shiela Copps, thought that a $400 surcharge on MP3 players, would be a good way to curb music piracy. I don't think the details of how to destinguish an portable MP3 player, from just another computer were able to be worked out, so this was just one reason that ill formed idea died on the table.
So much to tax, so little time. Isn't it bad enough that governments tax our purchases, now we are letting companies write taxes into their licences? Sheesh.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Ok. Most people have figured out by now that these prices have been up for a long time. Is there A) any evidence that open source decoders (like mpg123) are being bullied around, and B) any official statement from Redhat that they're intentionally pulling MP3 decoders from Rawhide?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Is there a list somewhere of the packages that were removed from Rawhide? If so, I could compile new meta-rpm such that it would install the latest versions of each onto new RedHat installs.
Yeah, better make sure you turn that off while you can.
It should work fine for you until that EULA you agreed to initiates an automatic OS upgrade will turn it back on and invalidate all of your files.
That's not quite right. Submarine patents have, I believe, made illegal. But this wasn't a submarine patent. A submarine patent is one that is applied for, and then repeatedly has it's release date postpooned to ammend the claims. This allowed the claim to be made at one date, and not become effective as a patent until much later. Which would be when the countdown toward expiration started.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I'd be willing to pay $100 towards the cause.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
Someone could conceivably come up with a converter that goes directly from mp3 to ogg without ever decoding mp3 to raw audio first... I think such a program would not be covered by the mp3 patents.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You don't have double loss of quality. It was already taken out when the file was stripped of the things that you don't hear when it is a raw PCM file. You do lose a bit- it is the nature of the algorithm, but it is not even close to "double loss of quality".
Who this kills is the free (as in speech) players - Zinf, XMMS, etc. They can't afford $50k OR $0.75/copy. They can either hope Fraunhofer doesn't notice them, or try to relocate to a place with either no software patents or no Fraunhofer patent, or they can leave MP3. In fact, Linux users in general may be left out in the cold, because I'm not aware of any commercial MP3 decoders for Linux, at all.
Unfortunately, this probably won't be enough to move the world from MP3s. WinAmp will still be downloadable for free, which is all 98% of users care about.
I remember when I was at EMusic, I met with the Thompson guys, who were trying to figure out how to make money on this (circa 1999). I explained to them that nobody was going to pay for a decoder, and that their choice was either to give the decoder away or have people switch to something else. I also suggested the encoder should be free for non-commercial use, in order to cement their current dominance against (then soon-to-be-released) Windows Media.
One of them replied (imagine a German accent), "I see! Vee give avay evrysing for free, and you make more money selling music!"
So, you could say we had a meeting of the minds.
However, as long as you are willing to live with a slight loss of quality and/or a slight increase in file size, it should be nowhere near as bad as for analog files. If you do mp3->wav, the wave file should already be quantized in such a way that it is easily compressable by another program. In principle, for instance, you should be able to re MP3 encode with no further loss of quality (whether actual MP3 encoders do this is another question). Ogg uses a different algorithm, so there will be a slight degredation, but it shouldn't be that bad if the encoder is designed to handle low entropy input well.
Whether this happens in reality, I don't know, but I am sure some smart people could figure out a way to do it.
This is a common misconception.
The Paris convention allows the patent holder to apply for a patent in other countries, within a year of the initial filing, and use the initial filing date in the first country as the filing date.
It does not give automatic patents in all countries.
IANAL, but that is how the Patent Lawyer explained it to me.
So if I needed several hours to figure something out I should be able to patent it? Just figured out a new mouseclick combination to navigate faster through Slashdot...
And, regarding E=mc^2: Don't you think it took several hours as well to come to this conclusion? So why don't you think one should be able to patent this formula as well?
This is the problem with algorithm patents. They're not a "product". It's very dangerous to make mathematical formulas patentable, because most of them are just observations like "hey, this and this has happened if I combine numbers A and B like this", not inventions.
Just imagine someone would own a patent on Fast-Fourier-Transformation (FFT). What would happen? This is very close to JPEG and MP3 techniques, btw.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Sun pulled downloads of the Java Media Framework last week because of an undisclosed "licensing issue". Wonder if this it.
Guess there's no point promoting my open-source shoutcast/icecast support for JMF anymore. Damn. Almost topped 20 downloads.
--realinvalidname